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Vorax

Matthew Farrer

Ratiomancer Rhaal’s legs are heavy-boned machines, bulged at the hip and bent backward at the knee, cored in a nickel-steel alloy. Their mechanisms whine softly as they walk, with splayed, cloven feet clanking on the deck.

His arms are longer than his organic arms were, moving smooth and silent on universal joints and faced with silver. When they were first grafted to him, the palms and backs of the hands were etched with patterns describing the sacred formulae of Old Mars. When he threw down his oaths on the steps of Kelbor-Hal’s shrine and renamed himself from calculus to ratiomancer, he took an engraving tool, drilled it into his torso to anoint it with his own blood, and then filed all those old designs away. He can still remember the teeth-gritting vibration coming through the metal into his flesh-body.

It was not long afterwards that the smoothed silver plating began to tarnish and rise in organic-looking blisters that Rhaal could neither understand nor explain. Now his hands look like blighted human limbs instead of the perfect mechanisms that they are. The growths seem to be forming new patterns of their own.

This excites Rhaal, although he is not sure why.

It excites him even more to see those hands wrapped around the neck of Enginseer Arrys, their festering patina staining the man’s red collar and hood. He gives him a little shake as he drags him backwards down the crawlway, as though testing that he is still alive. He knows Arrys is still alive, of course – he is monitoring the enginseer’s vital signs with a battery of inhuman senses. The shake is just to see if he can get a reaction.

He does. Arrys’s jaw works and a brief attempt at speech is choked off somewhere down in Rhaal’s grip.

‘No, no, no, nooooo,’ Rhaal croons, rocking the enginseer as if soothing a baby rather than gripping an enemy by the throat. His flesh-voice is reedy and wavering from lack of use. <Like this,> he cants, and sends a hoarse bark of scrapcode into the enginseer’s ears.

Even as he continues to pull the half-dead man along, he watches the code hit the aural processors as sound waves, turn into micro-impulses in his mechanised senses and flit into his augmented nervous system to join the infectious code already there. Arrys’s systems writhe with metastasising scrapcode structures, building and rebuilding themselves, eating away at him from within. Some of the growths have begun to fight amongst themselves over access to the handful of as-yet unspoiled systems. Rhaal giggles to see that. He can’t wait to see it happen again, writ large across the Imperial manifolds that he can dimly sense around him.

Somewhere in the distance there is a whoosh and clang as some component of the great Ring of Iron realigns itself, the vibration briefly palpable even through Rhaal’s heavy metal legs.

Or maybe a ship has docked, or a piece of the vast orbital debris field has caromed off the Ring’s armoured hide.

No matter. The Ring is an artefact of the old Mechanicum. Rhaal doesn’t expect it to last long into Kelbor-Hal’s new order – not once this war is all settled and Mars is free to begin remaking itself in earnest.

Rhaal’s work is part of the very earliest stages of that great work. Small, but not trivial. As peripheral and yet important as… filing the sacred designs off a silver augmetic. What a comparison! Rhaal almost code-chuckles at his own audacity as he drags Arrys’s limp body along.

Along and ahead, deeper into the humid and electric smoke-filled darkness.

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Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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ISBN 978-1-78251-843-3

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